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The Bard's Tale IV is supposed to be coming out sometime next year, but as of now we've seen precious little of it, certainly compared to other games with the same release timeframe. Today inXile published a new Kickstarter update for the game, the first in over two months. It's still not the big gameplay reveal everybody was hoping for, but at least it's more interesting than the last one. The update is by systems designer David Rogers and its topic is puzzle weapons - weapons whose powers can be unlocked by manipulating their components, solving riddles and combining items in the correct way. I quote:

The Hidden Power of Puzzle Weapons

Puzzle weapons are our spin on magic weapons in the world of The Bard’s Tale, and part of the Enhanced Crafting System stretch goal that you helped achieve. We want the sense of discovery to begin anew when you loot a magic weapon, rather than end as soon as you look at the tooltip. If you think back to the Kickstarter, you might remember this concept video:

We used that mockup to explore several core concepts about puzzle weapons that really enchanted us. We loved the idea that a weapon could hold dormant power, and that you could be holding onto one of these weapons for hours or days without realizing exactly how powerful the weapon truly was. We loved the idea that not every part of the weapon was fully obvious, and that you might have to poke around to find how to unlock the next step. We also liked the idea that your weapon would transform in some way when its true power was finally unlocked. These are all core tenets we held onto when designing the full puzzle weapon system for The Bards Tale IV.

This is what a puzzle weapon looks like now. Puzzle weapons were crafted by the elves in ages past, and left in the realm of men. They’re infused with powerful magic that can only be unlocked by the worthy. When the player finds them, their true power lays dormant. To unleash that power and allow it to flow fully through the weapon, you must manipulate and examine the item in 3D. Components of the weapon may be missing, puzzles might be scrambled, and riddles are most definitely accounted for.

Behind the scenes, puzzle weapons are generated from a large set of components, and found as high-tier loot as you adventure through the world. For example, a puzzle mace is constructed from a pommel, grip, collar, and bludgeon head. Each part features its own type of puzzle, and each puzzle has multiple variations and difficulties. The higher quality the item, the more ways to unlock its power you might find. The difficulty of the puzzles are based on your progress in the game, and how many other puzzle weapons you've previously solved.
In addition to self-contained puzzles that see you manipulating components on the item, there are also puzzles that interact with other elements of gameplay. Some puzzle weapons have you scouring merchants for magic gems for your weapon; others having you seeking out ancient shrines; while others still have you seeking to defeat specific enemies to feed the weapon with their blood; all the while you’re looking for hidden buttons, secret compartments, and manipulating small elements.
An In-Depth Look at Puzzle Weapon Mechanics

Let's go through an example. You've just found an Elven Mace with an empty power gem slot, and a set of interlocking rings around it. Rotate those rings the right way, and you'll spell out a riddle written in Elven language. The verse might read something as obvious as “As pure as snow and bright as moon, thy shining light is evil's doom.” - but many may be more cryptic.

Using the riddle, you'll determine which of the five differently colored Elven Seed Gems need to be inserted. Of course, finding one might require you to explore the world, barter with a merchant, or defeat a powerful enemy guarding it.

With the correct Elven Seed Gem inserted into the pommel, the weapon now has its power source, and begins glowing with magic! So what happens next?

Each time you solve a component on a puzzle weapon, that weapon earns a boon. Boons are special effects that come in multiple strengths, and can evolve as you continue to unlock your weapon's powers. One boon category is the Elder boon, which has three strengths: Elder, Of Ancient Slumber, and Ancestral. Your elven mace may become an Elder ElvenMace, meaning that its ability gains damage every single turn. Solve another component, and it becomes an Elven Mace of Ancient Slumber, which means that the first time it’s used in combat, it’s awoken, and deals a massive amount of bonus damage. Fully unlocking the weapon's true power could turn your mace into an Ancestral Elven Mace, which would cause this weapon to accumulate a large amount of bonus damage each turn it goes unused. And just to drive the point home, when you achieve the final tier of boon, the weapon visibly transforms to indicate that its magic is fully realized.

But don’t get too eager buying up every Seed Gem you see and haphazardly jamming ithem into your puzzle weapons. The elves are strict folk and demand perfection. When answering riddles on your puzzle weapons, incorrect answers are punished with a curse. Curses are negative effects that apply to attacks made by that weapon. Similar to boons, they start out light, but as you answer question incorrectly time and time again, the curse grows in severity. One of our curse categories is Decaying, which has three tiers of severity: Dull, Chipped, and Rust-Pocked. The first time you fail a riddle, your Elven Mace may become a Dull Elven Mace and suffer from a slight reduction in damage. Not so bad, even with the damage reduction it may still be the best weapon you have available. If you fail a riddle a second time, it becomes a Chipped Elven Mace instead. Now, instead of being dull, it has a % chance to be unusable for the rest of the fight after a single attack. If you continue to insist on guessing at the solution to the riddle, it finally becomes a Rust-Pocked Elven Mace, which imparts a much harsher curse: you’re only ever able to activate this weapon’s ability once per combat. Curses aren’t designed to make you throw away the weapon outright, but we do want you to think twice about trying to brute-force your way to a solution. There may be a way to remove curses in game, but don't expect it to be cheap or readily available.

Both boons and curses influence how you use your weapon in combat, or how you might build a character. For example, a Rust-Pocked Ancestral Elven Dagger would lead to a boss-obliterating rogue build where you wait 5 or 6 turns to accrue an insane amount of bonus damage before using other strength-amplifying abilities to land a walloping final blow. Unlocking the true power of a puzzle weapon is a quest in its own right, and one well worth the effort if you ever hope to save the world of Caith.​

We might be seeing more of The Bard's Tale IV soon. The next Kickstarter updates will be outlining the game's class system, which sounds like it's pretty complex. inXile are actually running a survey to select which class archetype to show first - Fighter, Practitioner, Rogue, or Bard, each of which consists of 4-6 classes. We also noticed that Bard's Tale series creator Michael Cranford is giving a talk about the development of the original games at GDC next March. Apparently inXile's community manager helped him put that together, so it's reasonable to assume it will be timed to promote the new game in some fashion.

And there I was hoping a Puzzle Weapon was a weapon with which I can destroy (annoying) puzzles.

I'm not sure how I feel about the puzzle component, I'll have to see it's implementation.
It's a part of the Enhanced Crafting System. So that means we will see more crafting
in addition to that. I don't even have a snarky remark about crafting left.

On no even more puzzles in Bard's Tale. No we didn't have enough puzzles with the dungeons and its magic darkness and teleporter fields, now we have also to endure the weapon puzzles. /sarcasm
I like the art of the elven weapons and their changes with the solved weapon puzzles and with their art this assets can be also used for a 3rd or first person game in the Bard's Tale world.

I'm really not that good at puzzles or riddles so hopefully I won't be missing out on all the really good weapons in the game!

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Don't worry there is something out there that is called the internet, and certainly people will post their solutions online (in the internet) then you will have to use the search engine (mostly used google.com) in a browser (a program that allows to look at different internet pages) and look for 'Bard's Tale, Weapon X puzzle solution'.

Last edited: Dec 6, 2017

On a good day i watch first 2001, then i listen to the music of Pink Floyd or Fields on the Nephilim. On a bad day i read the RPGCodex.

I like that they're trying something new, and honestly, they should get rid of all other crafting and just focus on making this work well.

Click to expand...

In the BT series you had weapon made out of MTHR, ADMT and DMND, perhaps they are aiming for some similar with material crafting of weapons and armor. What we know else is that there are 'magic stones' to power the weapons, so perhaps one can add a socket to a weapon to give it a DRBR ability or something like that. Crafting can be fun, like in Arcanum or Evil Island or Gothic (1 and 2), so i don't discard crafting as a whole. Naturally if the crafting is shit, then nobody forces a person to do it. And there are a lot of examples where the crafting is shit and i have never done it, like in PoE.
This puzzle weapons can be a very good idea and if they can make this 'work well', then it will be most interesting.

On a good day i watch first 2001, then i listen to the music of Pink Floyd or Fields on the Nephilim. On a bad day i read the RPGCodex.

Really cool idea! I hope more RPG designers adopt clever solutions to make games more interesting, more fun, and lastly - more challenging.

“Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the like of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.” ~Marquis de Sade's Apology Letter

I'm not really sure about this. It's a neat mechanic but it being a major type of weapon ruins a bit of the charm and seems kind of gimmicky. I thought it'd be more of a thing where you'd solve puzzles with them or had weapons that'd have niche applications and interactions that you'd learn about long down the line; in combat it'd be a "puzzle" to make them work properly. These ideas stem from me not really knowing the series well but they interest me a bit more.

That could be cool, but the way he mentioned "don't carry around a bunch of gems and try to jam them in there" makes me think it'll primarily be riddles to guess a color. Basically cryptic socketing. I'm hoping that socketing is just a single type of these, like, others you might need travel to different areas and do something, or plant a tree or something in the correct tile in the world, or just a bunch of various activities that aren't guessing a color. It's a really awesome idea, but with the potential for pretty lame implementations.